The creation of large farms at the commercial level for raising domestic animals in large numbers such as cows, chickens, pigs and swine, has created an increased environmental concern over the animals' waste products produced by such a large domestic production of animals. The primary benefit of housing and feeding larger numbers of agricultural animals at a single site is that the consolidated operations give an economy of scale that lowers per unit product operating costs and improves profitability. However, as the number and size of concentrated, confined animal feeding operations has grown over the years, the development of technology to treat the waste material from these facilities has seriously lagged. One method of utilizing manure is to use it as a fertilizer media. However, there are environmental concerns about direct application of raw manure to the ground, including rainwater runoff of pollutants into surface and ground waters, emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and soil contamination, particularly for agricultural purposes, resulting from the large volume of waste. Therefore, utilization of animal manure has become a tremendous environmental problem throughout the world. One method to solve this problem is to use animal manure in a medium, as a method to promote plant propagation.
Although manure may be used to increase soil fertility, if it is used without any processing or aging, it has high levels of salts that may “burn” plants, smell unpleasant, have high levels of pathogenic microorganisms, and decompose rapidly. Composts containing manure are effective uses of manure but are heavy and expensive due to extensive processing. One reason for this heaviness is the high moisture content, as even screw pressed manure has moisture content of 70% or greater.
To effectively improve plant growth, media used for growing plants must have a number of important features. First, media should improve cellular structure, water-holding capacity, and aeration. To do so, the media must be porous and well-drained, yet able to retain moisture to meet water needs of plants between irrigations. Spagnum peat moss is considered to be among the very best planting medium components, because it contains large numbers of water-holding cells. Media for growing plants should also reduce salt content and improve ion exchange. Growing media must have a low salt content but a high ion exchange capacity to supply nutrients necessary for plant growth.
Plant media should have a distinct advantage of being renewable. Media such as peat moss is at best semi-renewable and has a large carbon foot print because of the harvesting, drying, and shipping it requires. In some years, peat moss has been in short supply because of vagaries of weather during the harvest season. Manure is, of course, available nearly everywhere.
Planting media should ideally be low in weight when dry. Generally, products for the retail market state that a bag contains dried manure or composts. However, these commercially available bags typically weigh 40 lb per cubic foot and contain a great deal of water which is undesirable.
Commercially available manure products are generally not dust, weed, odor, and pathogen free. Almost all commercially available composts, dried manures and the like are not “clean hands” products, making them difficult to spread and use. Furthermore, commercially available mixes are generally heavy and are largely impermeable to gas exchange. The impermeability to gas exchange makes these mixes poorly suited to quality plant production.
In the prior art, a variety of treated manures are known. However, they are all only effective in accomplishing one or two of the aforesaid purposes, and no treated manure that can comprehensively answer all of the aforesaid purposes is known as yet.
The present invention is directed to overcoming these deficiencies in the art.